Discipling Your Child's Heart

The heart is the core of us as humans, and Jesus said that what is in our hearts will eventually come out of our mouths. (Luke 6:45 …For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.) No one knows this truth more than a mom. As a mom, we can see inside our child’s heart almost like an x-ray machine.  Even when my children were in college, I could always tell when they visited home if their heart wasn’t in a good place. A mom just knows. The challenging part of the heart is that no one else can “fix” it, except that person. You can (and should) discipline behavior, but you can’t put your child in a time-out for being jealous of their friend’s success, or ground them for not forgiving a sibling. As moms I think we will always desire to ‘fix’ our children, but the condition of their heart is something only your child –with Christ’s help - can fix.

Once this truth gets inside your head and into your heart it is incredibly freeing to us as moms. We do not bear the responsibility for our child’s heart. We cannot make them be loving, truthful, kind or selfless. We simply cannot. Those things and the responsibility for them belong to God and to our child.

So what’s a mom to do?

We need to continue being consistent and point out what we see in love. We can and ought to direct our children in the way they should go to fix the condition of their heart. The last thing (that we forget about most of the time) is to pray. We can pray that God will soften our child’s heart. We can pray He will help them to see the lack of forgiveness, the self-righteousness, the jealousy, the self-centeredness, whatever is there.

Don’t give up moms, Christ doesn’t give up on us, and we can’t give up on our children!

For more advice & wisdom on how to tackle the "heart" issues - tune in to Episode 95 of our podcast Wire Talk with Karen Stubbs